The GOP has abandoned effective leadership for MAGA acolytes

I’ve written extensively over the past few months on how the Republican Party’s new look resembles little of what it once represented. Whether it be the policy platform or the voting base it’s trying to capture, the GOP is different.
But there’s one other way in which the GOP has changed: Personnel. 
The Republican Party has morphed over the past decade. The change from traditional conservativism to MAGA is complete, and former President Donald Trump is largely to blame.
We see this in the shift between Trump’s reelection campaign and the type of politicians steering the ship. Republicans have gone from leaders promoting a more conservative platform for the sake of the country to a new brand of followers dedicated only to the promotion of Trump.
As a result, conservatives are stuck with a flailing Trump campaign that doesn’t know how to navigate the lane of persuasion and politics, nor do they care to learn. Rather than look to the experience of effective GOP politicians of previous eras, they instead want to charge full force into MAGA politics and steer the party in a volatile direction.
We saw it at this year’s Republican National Convention, where neither Mitt Romney nor George W. Bush spoke. That means a former Republican presidential nominee and president, respectively, were nowhere to be found as the party officially nominated a new presidential ticket.
This all happened in a year when Trump had already, once again, trashed the legacy of Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee for president in 2008.
In contrast, the Democrats trotted out former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton to rally voters for Vice President Kamala Harris. While the Democrats have changed notably since the Obama era, they have somehow avoided the stark partisan infighting that now plagues the GOP and the seeming disgust with the party’s past. 
This also goes beyond Republican candidates and presidents. The old GOP guard is no longer playing a permanent role. This includes the most effective Republican of my lifetime, Sen. Mitch McConnell, who orchestrated every conservative success of the past 20 years. 
Even Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, has been jettisoned from the party for refusing to break the law to deliver Trump an election he did not win.
These individuals made the grave error of not fully joining the MAGA movement, so they had to be forced out of the party. 
Instead, at this year’s GOP convention, the speaker list was pretty much just the members of the legislative branch most aligned with Trump, as well as celebrities like Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Oh, and an OnlyFans model.
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The closest thing to the old guard featured was Nikki Haley, a half-baked attempt at unity despite the rest of the convention paying little attention to her primary voters’ interests. It also is worth asking whether Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a former South Carolina governor, would have done so had she not needed to save face following the political beating she took from Trump in the primary.
Throwing away relationships with leaders who have delivered concrete conservative victories over the past several decades is just another problem with the Trump faction’s ego. The through line of the GOP’s shift since 2016 has been a culture of losing, and Republicans keep returning for more. 
While conservatives of the last generation could look to Bush, McCain and McConnell for stable leadership, the Republican Party of today entirely lacks that level of stewardship.
The names the MAGA movement chooses to elevate clearly show that loyalty is valued over experience.
Take the elevation of Sen. JD Vance of Ohio for example. Vance had little experience in politics before being selected as Trump’s vice presidential nominee, and the only thing that truly benefitted him was his willingness to say nice things about Trump (at least in the present day).
Other examples include the slate of failed candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, in which Trump endorsements performed far below expectations, largely because the only thing they had going for them was their love of Trump.
The MAGA movement wants two outcomes from their elections. They either want to win by rallying their base, demonstrating that they don’t need to appeal to the old-guard GOP, or they want to lose and subsequently blame that faction for not bending the knee. 
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Both options, to little surprise, happen without the help of principled conservatives. MAGA would prefer to lose than to appeal to us. It seems conservatives who won’t advance his agenda are as bad as a Democrat in Trump’s eyes.
Just look to Arizona, where Republicans have decided to nominate Kari Lake for the second election cycle in a row, this time for the Senate. Anybody could have told you that Lake would be unlikely to win, especially given her performance in the 2022 gubernatorial race. 
The GOP just doesn’t care at this point. MAGA’s takeover is the only thing that matters.
Rather than build a coherent political movement, the current GOP would rather live or die by Trump regardless of electoral prospects.
Conservatives who dislike Trump are exhausted by the level of insanity playing out over and over again in front of us. In the face of losses, the GOP keeps doubling down on Trump, trying to recapture the shock victory from 2016 rather than returning to the stability of the GOP in the 2000s.
Despite repeated losses, the GOP seems to keep thinking the people to blame are the Republicans who simply want respectable candidates.
Americans deserve stability in politics, even if that is a tall ask. It would be nice if the Republican Party cared about that.
Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.